Photo from the cover of Dagens Nyheter, 2018-11-26.

The picture above is from a recent cover page from Dagens Nyheter, one of the biggest daily magazines in Sweden. The cover is about their current, big series of articles on gang-related crime in Sweden: fatal shootings have increased a lot in numbers over the past years.

Dagens Nyheter writes widely on how the Swedish police should find new methods to investigate crime, in order to generate more sentences. That's the goal, apparently.

Deadly gang-related violence. Gangs. Violence. These words scare people.

Actually, there are no gangs in Sweden. Not if you follow the Interpol definition. People en masse seem to have this weird conception that a gang is akin to the Corleone family in the film "The Godfather".

There are criminal networks in Sweden. But there is more than one difference between a gang and a network. People exit criminal networks and enter others, possibly more often than a lot of people realise. And they backstab each other, leading to a very paranoid existence with no or little rest.

We talk about "criminal gangs" and "criminals" while discussing how to stop crime as if stopping crime is ever possible; remember "The war on drugs"? See how that worked out. Most of the talk that I've heard is just impersonating tabloid fodder, shock tactics designed to generate fear in order to sell more tabloids. It's really just easy click-bait money that has very little to do with what is actually happening in society, and why.

One of my pet peeves is when people parrot ideas without understanding them, especially when it comes to providing easy solutions to complex issues.

Granted, I'm like that in some areas, but I try to be respectful where it comes not to stereotyping or judging people, especially those who live a far less charmed life than I, at least when it comes to matters like having money, a roof over one's head, you know, basic human needs that are getting harder and harder to attain for most people.

If you blurt out simplistic solutions to complex problems, best be prepared to fess up to your claims. Do you truly understand the issues, especially if you're living a charmed life? Where are you getting your facts from? And, more importantly, where are you getting your "solutions" from? Have you spoken with any scientists who are intellectually and deeply into criminology?

When I was little, my peers and I used to say "you don't know what the hell you're talking about, shut up". Turns out, there are well-founded reasons for saying that to a lot of adults.

The recent Swedish governmental election contained shout-outs from most of the major political parties where nearly all of them simply pointed to the same old things that they wanted more of, when discussing crime:

• harsher penalties
• longer jail time

Nobody even touched on why deadly crime is on the increase. Oh, by the way, violent crime is still on the way down in Sweden, which is the case since decades back in time.

Here comes a statement about both of the bullet points above: they do not help victims nor prevent murders.

They don't help perpetrators either.

Why should the perpetrators be important, or their feelings even be considered? I hear you ask.

Because they're a part of we. We are all of equal worth and standing, and because of that simple maxim, we should collectively do what we can to help ourselves, as a whole.

Terrorism, talking junk: it's the same thing here, really.

The above image of Noam Chomsky is not aimed at low-level individuals who are involved in crime; it's aimed at all of us who think we cannot do anything about deadly crime.

I remember hearing Joan Petersilia speak at Stockholm University in 2014, where she spoke about using "imprisonment as little as possible despite decades of mandatory sentencing laws." At that same time, Daniel S. Nagin spoke about "evidence showing that imprisoning offenders generally fails to reduce repeat offending, and more often may increase crime rates, relative to community corrections options."

Also, check out what the recently announced 2019 winners of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology have done:

"Ruth Dreifuss was the principal political defender of a seminal set of experiments to test whether an innovation in the treatment of heroin users could help mitigate the crime and health problems of prohibition. In these experiments, individuals who had failed in methadone treatment programs were offered Heroin-Assisted Therapy (HAT), the opportunity to inject heroin provided by the state in medically supervised facilities. The question was whether HAT could be done safely and how it would influence the behaviour of the clients. The evidence showed that HAT greatly reduced the criminality of the clients, while improving their health."

"[Peter Reuter's] multi-national studies on the effects of enforcement on drug prices and availability found that many of the benefits of prohibition can be achieved with light enforcement, while tough enforcement can increase crime without reducing drug consumption."

So, scientists are not parroting tabloids—due to acting for science—which points away from the tabloids in all ways, leading towards a far more humanistic and understanding society.

Long sentences and harsh punishment does not help anybody, nor does it prevent crime.

If you want more knowledge about how criminality can be stopped at any point in life, check more information out from many sources, for example, Laub and Sampson.

This book opens doors.

Today, youths growing up in Sweden face far more grave difficulties in comparison with what I faced when growing up, which was during the relatively affluent 1980s and -90s. I'm 41 years old today. I grew up in Hallunda, which was then considered a less-than-fortunate part of Stockholm, currently thought by alarmists to be a "no-go zone"; spoiler: it's not; there aren't any no-go zones in Sweden.

• where I grew up

When I turned old enough to have to get a real job, I had a surname which was not typical for Swedes, I flunked out of University and the military, worked as a dish-washer while DJing a lot, which...perhaps would not seem 100% attractive to potential employers.

I dove straight into computers and the world of IT. No real issues in getting jobs after that. Employers rightfully didn't really care why I'd not worked or studied all of my semi-adult life. They just cared if I knew what I claimed to know.

I was called to job interviews quite regularly and interviewers didn't care about where I lived. The same went for nearly all of my friends, regardless of background, skin colour, and surname: shared beginnings, and quite the life trajectory. Sure, racism existed. Everywhere. But things were not jagged nor impenetrably hard. I even had friends who were junkies who swung their lives around.

Today, it's very different. Kids have sky-high expectations on them. All they do is measured against the insurmountable wall that is Instagram, Facebook, racism, sexism, and the idiotic illusion that is "if you just work hard, you'll get rich; if you don't, that's your own fault".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_Ik7OppEI

A belief that capitalism + class mobility—the notion that one can, by sheer willpower, move from one social level to another—works, is simply wrong. The rich get richer and more powerful, and the poor are more like wage slaves than ever before. As wealth is centralised further, the more effective are the tools to control the masses with.

Meanwhile, the middle-class worries about not having access to Netflix to dull ourselves with. Not having enough presents to peddle off at Christmas. Not having a good enough mobile phone, LinkedIn profile, Instagram post, not wearing the right brand of pants. There's even fear of missing out, which has turned into an acronym.

When you are born into abject poverty, your parents do what they can to provide, if they can, if they are in your life at all. You grow up feeling that you are the lowest of the low—not like the lowest of the low—and no matter what you do, you don't see any kind of future for yourself, or those around you.

School is flat. You can't make top grades because you need to help out at home a lot. Or perhaps there are problems at home that severely grate on you. Or you can't think straight because of worry, as you have no idea how rent will be paid on time - and this goes on for month after month, year after year.

If you live in a rented apartment in Stockholm, it takes about two weeks from your first missed rent payday until you're evicted.

You need to have saved money for years in order to be able to have a base to get a loan for an apartment in a "good" part of Stockholm; then, to secure a loan for the rest of the money that you need to buy an apartment, you need a full-time job. But to first save enough money for a loan, or a car to get to places if you can't use public transport, you need a decent wage.

Employers will demand to see your criminal record even when you apply for low-level entry jobs, and if it turns out that you've shoplifted once a few years ago, you're not even contacted any more during the interview process. You look down at your mobile phone screen and wonder whether your non-Swedish surname leads to discrimination; it often does (naturally only when the employer is an idiot, and who wants to work for an idiot, right - except sometimes you have to, when there's literally no other choice).

You know your friends are at home or on the streets. They might not be doing anything other than hanging out, but knowing that you're all in the same rut doesn't help your mindset. The feeling of being on the other side of what's "good" permeates everything inside and around you.

Desperation doesn't set in: it's there from the start and you can't think of a time when it's not been there. Try imagining a state of mind where you have never known anything other than desperation and being on the "bad" side of life, town, work, when you're seen as a non-person. It's not something you can merely think yourself away from.

Bear in mind, persons who think "every person is the architect of their own fortune" are seldom badly off; they actually don't know what they're talking about. They don't have the facts on what life can be like for some people. Saying that would be like saying "cheer up" to somebody when their beloved has just died. It's like listening to people who are against gender quotas who don't realise that the reason for wanting to implement gender quotas, to ensure gender equality, is a huge, covert, nepotistic, and mainly anti-feministic gender quota.

Some people around you do well. They're kids, just like yourself, hanging around where you live and are. They have money and are able to provide not only for themselves, but for their family. Their sisters have shoes that you see in commercials. Before that, they can afford heat. They don't have to worry about paying rent.

Q: you can go to job interviews just like everybody else, so why aren't you going?

A: A travel card for public transport in Stockholm currently costs close to 1000 Swedish Crowns, approximately 110 US Dollars. This means that many persons cannot even physically leave the place where they live. Imagine the consequences of that.

Sweden is a country where the wealth gap between classes is increasing at a neo-liberal expected pace. Remember Alan Greenspan testifying before US Congress about the importance of "worker insecurity"?

At the extreme top (top 0.1%) income transmission is remarkable with an intergenerational elasticity of approximately 0.9. We also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that IQ, non-cognitive skills and education of the sons are all unlikely channels in explaining the strong transmission.

Björklund, Anders & Roine, Jesper & Waldenström, Daniel, 2012. "Intergenerational top income mobility in Sweden: Capitalist dynasties in the land of equal opportunity?,"

Self-doubt sets in. You can't even help your family, let alone your friends. Where's the money? Where's the way out? You haven't bought new clothes in nearly a year, and nothing is changing. Nobody gives a fuck, right? So why should you?

It's not hard to see that people really need help. And while there are people helping, what's happening on the streets isn't a symptom of gang-related crime. It's a symptom of what happens when our weakest chains break, which is when we all should care and help out.

That's a human tendency, to help out. It's good and we know it.
Not to ensure that your Netflix account keeps running, or having the latest mobile phone. Those are just symptoms of a disease.

When you're little, playing along with your friends, life is fun. The saying is: when somebody who's playing the game becomes sad, it's not a game anymore. Then everybody turns to that person and cares about that individual, comforting that person, making sure it's not sad anymore. Then the game can commence, and fun continue.

Today, a lot of people don't care about numbers. They just want to see them jailed. Them. The monsters who are gunning down other monsters, because of, damn right, it's always criminals shooting other criminals, right? It's not like we've done anything? And how should our kids be safe on the streets if there are monsters running around with guns? What are their parents doing? What is the police doing? It's a good thing Politico X is saying he'll rid the streets of crime because that's what we need. We need armed guards nearby schools and gated communities, and just keep the monsters away and locked up for a very, very long time. Heck, why not forever? I don't want them hanging around the walkway  from my garage to my home.

People need to get a firm grip on themselves if they're thinking desperate times will not lead to desperate measures.

Sweden is one of the most successful countries in the world, economically speaking, and is totally dependant on immigrants and the power of everything that immigration sparks. Sweden cannot run without it. Still, we have an extreme right-wing party in government that gives their all to point out immigration as the main and almost sole root cause of all of our problems.

Naturally, scientists and others disagree. But that doesn't faze people who are looking for easy ways out. It's them, not us.

A slew of people in Sweden has since long thought of the USA as a kind of big gated community, a place where people haven't been able to take care of each other, and therefore, lost control of themselves. "Thankfully, it's their problem."

If you think I'm being negative, I hear these sentiments on a daily basis. Racist and other xenophobic views are flaunted in off-handed ways fairly often. We must fight them every single time we hear them so that they don't spread; and we must do this through compassion, understanding, and love.

I may sound solipsistic when writing this, but I know that the issue is not inherently American; it's happening here, right now, as the wealth gap between the poor and the not-so-poor is increasing, not to speak about the ultra-wealthy men who own almost everything.

Recently, there was a publication by Citigroup, one of the biggest banks. They put out a study for investors in which they identify a new category in the world—what they call the “plutonomy”—those who have substantial wealth. The plutonomy are the main drivers of the economy—they’re the main consumers, that’s where all the wealth goes—so Citigroup has a “plutonomy investment portfolio.” They’ve had it since the mid-’80s, when Reagan and Thatcher in England drove forward policies of enriching the very wealthy and letting everyone else suffer. And they point out that their plutonomy investment portfolio has far outperformed the market, and urge investors to concentrate on investing for the plutonomy. So the small percentage of the world’s population that’s gathering together in increasing wealth—that’s what you focus on. The rest you can forget about.

Now, the plutonomy is much more rigorously following Adam Smith’s vile maxim: “All for ourselves, nothing for anyone else.” What about the rest? There’s a term coming into use for them, too. They’re called the “precariat,” precarious proletariat—the working people of the world who are living a more and more precarious existence. So we have the precariat living insecure, precarious lives, getting by if they can, many in terrible poverty and suffering in other ways—and the advice of Citigroup (which, by rights, the public ought to own by now, having bailed them out so often—but they’re doing fine, richer than ever) is that they’re asking investors to focus attention on the plutonomy. It’s a really serious problem, and we’re heading toward a cliff. But from the point of view of the masters of mankind, it doesn’t matter much—“as long as we make plenty of profit tomorrow, who cares if our grandchildren won’t have a world to live in?” It’s related to the attitude toward the country altogether. Well, that’s a division the world over. In China, it’s the same—it has an extremely oppressed labor force, no independent unions, tens of thousands of labor protests every year—and super-wealth. In India it’s even more extreme. In other developing countries it’s changing a little bit, like in Latin America. Take Brazil, a most important country, where there have been significant attempts to deal with the tremendous inequality and overwhelming problem of poverty and starvation in the past ten years. But for the most part I think the Citigroup analysis is pretty accurate—there’s a plutonomy that’s very rich, and the rest get by somehow if they can.

Noam Chomsky, "Requiem for the American Dream"

By creating more and bigger barriers between classes, we are only putting bars in our own minds, while fuelling the flames of desperation which leads to explosions. And then we stand around, pointing at the stupid poor people who smash their own neighbourhoods up. Haha how can they? Have you ever asked yourself what causes extreme reactions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN8FCfD8Bd0

Desperation does not appear out of thin air.

I'm reminded of what Noam Chomsky said in this interview with James Resnick when talking about optimism:

JR: Inequality in all its forms continues to threaten democracy in the United States. Do you see evidence that positive change to reverse these trends will arise, and is there a case for optimism?

NC: We can be very optimistic. Things like this have happened before and they’ve been overcome. The 1920s were a period kind of like this in many ways, but the 1930s were a significant revival, things changed and there are forces you can easily identify. A lot of the support for Sanders is promising and could have a lot of promise but it depends how it is developed; the same with Corbyn in England and Podemos in Spain. There are reactions to problems that are not easy to overcome, but I think there are plenty of possibilities.

So, we can change these things. And we must do it together, against the people who want things to stay the way they are.

It's just important to remember where power should be: with the people. Not with the billionaires. Just remember the original meaning of "the American dream".

In summation: I advise everyone who thinks Sweden is about to collapse due to gang-related violence to speak with people, citizens and experts alike. We're all here. The Internet is powerful and allows us to communicate with nearly anybody. Just remember that human communication is at the base of everything. Let's open our hearts wider and stop stereotyping people. I firmly believe that's really the only way we can go forward with all of this.